The fake disabled are crippling our economy

Rod Liddle has just incurred the wrath of the disability lobby by having a go in his Sun column at "pretend disabled" people. Included in this category, Rod decided, were people with fibromyalgia and ME. Lots of people queued up Twitter to say how horrid they thought he was, wishing he would succumb to some kind of disability himself, etc.

I suppose, having recently suffered from an ME-like illness I should be one of them. But unlike Rod's Twitter critics I took the trouble to read the full article and I think Rod's point is well made. There really are far, far too many people sponging off the taxpayer right now with their fake or exaggerated disabilities and they're one of the reasons we're in the financial mess we're in.

One of.

Disability; anti-racism; diversity; anti-homophobia; anti sex-discrimination; etc: every one of these has its specialist lobby group which considers it its bounden duty to screw the economy for as much as it possibly can. Sometimes it does so directly, through entirely unnecessary government offshoots like the Equality and Human Rights Commission; sometimes it does so indirectly, via all the various forms of swingeing anti-discrimination legislation and regulation and inconvenience imposed on private business.

And amazingly the government actually pays these lobbyists to grumble and campaign for even more stringent, costly legislation and regulation. A report last year from the Taxpayers' Alliance showed that in 2007/8 over £37 million of our money was spent on our behalf, so that hard-left organisations like Friends Of The Earth and the New Economics Foundation can campaign for more encroachment in our lives by the overweening state.

This isn't going to last. It cannot last. Future historians are going to look back in astonishment at the lunacy of an age when, according to one government definition from the New Labour era, fully 11 million people – that's a quarter of the adult population – qualified as disabled. Where does the money come from?

Three places: taxation; inflationary money-printing; borrowing.

Every time the disability lobby squeals for more another few jobs are lost, another few basis points are lost from GDP growth. But these people don't care; they know better than that: the government owns a magic money tree and its ability to distribute the fruits thereof is boundless.